In a rush of terror, she fled the restaurant and took the elevator down forty-two floors to the pavement, where she ran to her car and sped to the factory to pick up Johnny. They went home and watched the replay of the towers collapsing.
But there was the Jacksonville Bank of America Tower, still standing rigid and stubborn, casting its shadow over the snaking St. Johns. It hadn’t gone anywhere. And neither had she. She didn’t know whether this was a good thing or not. Her calves burned. Her foot throbbed. Step-step-step-step-breathe. Step-step-step-step-breathe. This wasn’t going well. She squinted ahead. The peak of the bridge seemed miles away, a green metal mountain, Florida alpine. Get your mind off it, Pauline. Think about something else. Distraction—that was the ticket. She listened to Tulley’s feet hitting the pavement beside her, listened to his ragged breathing. So he was feeling it, too. Good.
“Where were you? When you learned? About 9/11?” she managed. Breathe. Breathe. Step. Step.
“Huh,” he said. He chuckled.
“What?”
“It’s embarrassing. People have asked me that, and I’ve usually made up a fib.”
“Why?”
“I was in bed with someone I should not have been in bed with.”
Lord!
He seemed to be waiting for a response. “Oh,” was all she could manage.
“She was one of my professors in law school,” he said. “We were at this academic conference in Chicago, and we heard people shouting out in the hallway. It was the cleaning staff. They were watching it on a TV in the room next door. That’s how I found out about it. In bed with my married professor. Not my finest hour.”
Why, in the name of God, was he telling her this? He could simply have said he was in Chicago. In a hotel room. Leave out that salacious little detail; that would have been the right thing to do. But she knew why. Number one, he knew Pauline would assume his bedfellow was older than him. Do the math: He was in his early twenties on 9/11. Any law school professor would have had a good ten years on him, right? Number two, he was letting her know that sleeping with married women was not on his personal list of no-nos. A picture—unbidden, uncontrollable—came to her just then: Sam Tulley in a hotel bed, morning light at the windows, supporting his weight on tanned arms planted on either side of her body—
“Tenth of a mile!” he shouted. “We’ve got this!” She nearly stumbled. Then she took a deep breath and pushed on. Her lungs felt ready to collapse. Her thighs trembled. Step, gasp, step, gasp. They peaked at the top of the bridge and Pauline thought her legs might buckle. The sun was crashing over the St. Johns now, and a trio of cars, some of the first commuters of the morning, passed them slowly, friendly. One driver beeped and waved. And now it was all easy, just keep your balance, girl, you got this! The steps were coming steady and strong, down the descent, no problem now. Gotta get back over, sure, but she’d walk it on the way back, no matter, you just do it once, that’s all you need, then you know you can do it. They ran down the east side of the bridge, and Pauline had the feeling of descending a slope. Of falling, falling, falling.
They were back at the cars, guzzling water and stretching out the cramps, when it got a little weird.
“Listen,” Sam Tulley said. “I want to tell you something, Pauline.” She grabbed her right foot and brought it up behind her. She looked at him.
“This is a little hard to say,” he said. He took a deep breath. “I really like you, Pauline.” Pauline dropped her foot and stood still. What was he saying? He looked at her, waiting for a response. Lord! She chose her words carefully.
“Well, I like you too, Sam,” she said evenly. She hesitated. “I think we are working together very well.”
“No, I mean, there’s more than that,” he said. More than that? Pauline felt herself getting flustered. Okay, she’d admit it—she’d been enjoying the flirtation; no doubt. It would have been impossible not to. But what was he doing now? Was he seriously coming on to her? This was ridiculous, of course. It was time to put a stop to it.
“Sam,” she said. She put her hands up. “I think we should watch what we are saying.”
“No, really, Pauline. Let me say this,” he said. He wiped a line of sweat from his brow and stood there, pink-faced and breathing hard. “You don’t know. Ever since I left Ann Arbor it’s been hard, you know? I miss everybody up there. My friends, my family. The people at the law firm—God, all anybody does there is work. We never talk. So, well, anyway—I don’t know. We started talking, you and I, and for the first time, I feel like I’m connected to somebody down here, you know?”
“Sam.”
“Wait. I just want to say it. We may not see each other after the appeal is over, and I want you to know that you are very important to me.” Pauline’s heart was pounding. This was crazy! This lawyer-boy, this Ashton Kutcher look-alike—he’d honestly fallen for her? Unreal! She was both shocked and thrilled. Oh, imagine! And bold, too, wasn’t he! Imagine the moxie, making a speech like this to a married woman. Well, my word. Okay, now, let him down easy, she told herself. It wasn’t meant to be, tell him. I’m married. No, Sam. In the next lifetime, maybe.
“I mean, when I’m with you, I feel like I’m with my mom,” he was saying.
Wait. What?
“What?” She hadn’t realized she said that out loud.
“No, really,” he said. “You remind me of her so much. I used to run with my mom all the time at home. I really miss that. Her—I guess I really miss her. So anyway,” he sighed. “I guess I’ll just say thanks for hanging out with me, Pauline. Mom.” He gave a rueful chuckle.
Pauline teetered on a vast cliff of humiliation.
Mom?
Mom?
Well, shee-ut, as Packy would say. Don’t that just beat all. Pauline bit her lip. The tears were right there, up close, but she chewed them back and started babbling. She buried her face in a towel under the pretense of wiping sweat, mouth running the whole time. She really had no idea what she was saying to Sam Tulley—something about Oh, my pleasure, haha, so great to get to know you, your mom must be very proud of you indeed, blah, blah, blah.
He gave her an awkward and sweaty half-hug and climbed into his car. She waved benevolently—God, the gesture probably looked matronly—and climbed into the Prius. She drove back up the Hart and headed east, moving into the sunrise and feeling a hundred years old.
The aches set in later that morning, after her shower. Fire in her thighs, a stabbing pain in her right hip. Her calves tightened up like cantaloupe rinds. She hobbled to the medicine cabinet and took the last three ibuprofen tablets. She’d need more to make it through the day at the factory, that much she knew. That was the bitch of pain—it always showed up even worse later. She checked her watch. It was still early. She could dash to CVS for ibuprofen and be back in time to have a cup of tea—to try to calm down—before taking on the commute to the factory.
“Come on,” she said to General San Jose. “You need an outing.”
She let the dog jump into the front seat of the Prius and then drove through Watchers Island to the CVS near the bridge. She parked and left the windows cracked open a few inches. “I’ll be right back,” she told the General. He looked at her, stricken. “I promise,” she said. “Two minutes.” Good heavens, she thought, looking at him. He was starting to panic. She might as well have been leaving him at a dachshund abattoir. “You’ll be fine!” she said. He started to quake and pant. Oh, for God’s sake. She locked him in the car and dashed for the store.
The drugstore was crowded. The drugstore was always crowded! Even on an early morning like this one, when you’d think people would be at work, like she should have been, here they all were at CVS, crowding around the pharmacy counter, poking through the cosmetics, fiddling with the self-serve kiosks at the photo center. She found the ibuprofen and selected the Valu-Size! bottle. She stood in line at the register and regarded a rack crowded with Halloween paraphernalia: gigantic bags of candy, gummy-looking makeup kits, c
heap witch hats, fat plastic pumpkins. God, when was Halloween? Tomorrow? Good Lord.
“I hate Halloween,” she said, to no one in particular.
“Tell me about it,” the young woman behind her said. Pauline turned around. The woman was wearing a beach sarong and flip-flops with high wedge heels. She had a baby on one hip and a case of beer on the other. “I got three girls at home who want Kardashian costumes, and I’m running out of time. You think I got money for that? Have you seen what those people wear? Damn.”
Pauline smiled politely and turned to face forward again. From where she was standing in line she could see out the store’s front windows to where the Prius was parked. General San Jose was standing up in the driver’s seat, his paws against the steering wheel, looking toward the store. She knew he was probably about to have a heart attack, being left alone like that. It was the General’s worst fear: solitude. She could understand it. He bobbed down from the driver’s seat and came up again on the passenger’s side. Then down again, up in the backseat. Up, down, up, down. He looked like a jack-in-the-box. What a crazy dog.
She checked Scrabble. It was her turn. Corran had played NOW. Now? What did that mean? No telling. Sometimes the words didn’t mean anything at all; sometimes they were just words, just something to come up with for the sake of the move when your turn came up. It all depended on the letters you lucked onto. She looked at her selection of letters and spotted a good opportunity. It almost made her smile, but the morning’s humiliation and the aching in her legs canceled out the impulse. Still. BUDDY, she played. It’s what she used to call Corran when he was little.
C’mon, buddy! Come gimme a hug, buddy! We missed you, buddy!
Well, now that was depressing. Pauline put the phone in her purse. She looked at the Halloween candy. She’d already stocked up at Publix on Twizzlers and Skittles, the kinds of candies she knew she would dutifully hand out to the evening’s trick-or-treaters and not be tempted to eat. Because what was the point? Fruit-flavored candy? Please. If she was going to waste calories on candy, you’d better believe it was going to be chocolate. In fact—she plucked two bags of bite-sized Milky Ways out of the bin and waited her turn at the register.
She made it back to the car before the General succumbed to heart failure. “You need to pull yourself together,” she said to him. “I mean, really.” He pushed himself into her lap and sat there trembling. At home, she carried him back up the stairs and placed him on the bed. He collapsed on the duvet, exhausted with trauma. She left him there and went down to the kitchen, where she followed her plan and forced herself to sit for ten minutes with a cup of tea to calm down before she went to work, though she found herself jiggling her leg maniacally and staring at the clock the entire time. Eight minutes. Nine. Ten. There. All calmed down. Except she wasn’t. She caught a glimpse of herself in the black glass reflecting from the microwave. What was that? She tipped up her chin and regarded herself, then got up and moved toward the oval mirror in the hallway. Jowls. She had jowls, suddenly. She hadn’t known you could develop jowls overnight. Well, you don’t, dummy. They take fifty years. Duh!
She went back to the kitchen. Her cell phone was vibrating, and she picked it up. A text from Sam Tulley: Hey Mom. Just got word—appeal hearing scheduled. November 15. We’ve got our work cut out for us. Pauline stared at the phone.
Johnny, she thought. Please come home.
Something snapped. Before she even realized what she was doing, her iPhone had hit the ceramic backsplash above the stove and had gone madly skittering—in several different pieces—to the four corners of the kitchen. She watched a piece of the glass screen bounce off the range and settle next to her foot. Well, she thought mildly. It occurred to her that this might have been something of an out-of-body experience. I guess I need a new phone now.
She had no idea what to do next. So she did the only thing she could think of: She drove to the factory to make ice.
Sixteen
It was proving difficult to deal with the issue of Corran’s disabled bicycle, and the futility of the effort seemed to Johnny to mirror the futility of this entire foolhardy, impetuous trip to Scotland. What had possessed him, anyway, flying over here on a wild hair like this? The past twenty-four hours had been a study in frustration—last night spent cooped up in the tiny crofter’s cottage thanks to the cold and rain, then this morning wasted with trying to find Chemal, who’d gone off with a raincoat and wellies for a walk to the village, got turned around somehow in the hedgerows lining the road back to the cottage, and had to be hunted down and fetched by car with Sharon at the wheel and Johnny spotting from the passenger seat.
And through it all, Corran putting on a forced, strident cheerfulness that could be interpreted in only one way—he wanted to be left the hell alone. At Sharon’s urging, Corran had traded shifts with another bloke from the ferry in order to have a day free for his father’s visit, but the adjustment felt like an awkwardly gallant gesture, in Johnny’s opinion. He got the feeling Corran would have rather been on the ferry. They kept walking through the cottage, bumping into each other. It was hard to know what to do.
At one point, during a break in the rain, Corran put on his hoodie and went outside. Johnny waited for a few moments, then followed. He found his son squatting on a patch of concrete outside the cottage’s toolshed, hunched over a shallow pan of water. Corran had removed the offending inner tube from the bike tire and now was slowly rotating the tube through the water, looking for the telltale bubbles that would locate the leak. He looked up briefly when Johnny approached, but said nothing and returned his attention to the inner tube.
“Find it?” Johnny said.
Corran shook his head. “Not yet.” Johnny upturned an empty bucket and sat down on it. A belt of wind came across the croft and rattled the toolshed.
“My God,” Johnny said. “You forget the cold here.”
Corran glanced at him. “Do you?” It felt like a challenge. Johnny let it slide. He watched Corran slide the tube through the water. Funny method, this. Johnny had picked it up as a young man and had taught it to Corran himself, many years ago. Watch for the air, he remembered telling the boy. Now a bright boiling erupted along the seam of the tube, and Corran sat back on his heels.
“Shit,” he said. “Not just one leak. Whole seam’s separating.”
“You’re not going to be able to patch that,” Johnny said. Corran didn’t answer. Johnny watched his son’s hands working over the tube, watched as he slid a rough finger into the broken seam. Corran’s hands were rough. Weathered. When had his boy become this man? Johnny took a deep breath. “You look good, Corran. You feeling good?”
“You mean am I shooting up, is what you mean,” Corran said immediately. “I thought you’d never ask. And the answer is no.” Corran glanced around the croft yard and gestured down the hill. “Unfortunately, skag’s in short supply around here. Maybe you could find me some in Florida, send it over.”
Was this supposed to be funny? Was Corran attempting a joke? Johnny didn’t know how to read his son, but he took a step toward playing along. “I wouldn’t know where to look for it,” he said.
“Ah, it’s closer than you think,” Corran said. “Always is.” He looked at Johnny for a long, uncomfortable beat.
“What?” Johnny said.
“What are you doing here?”
“Came out to see if I could help you with the tire.”
“Not here in this spot. Here in Scotland.”
“Ah,” Johnny said. “Well.” He took a breath. “I thought we should fix it up. Mend the fence, aye?”
Corran stood up. He tossed the wrecked tube into a trash can just inside the toolshed.
“Yep,” he said. “Right. Done.” He tipped up the rubber pan and let the water run across the concrete. He brushed his hands off and stuffed them into his pockets, then took a step toward the house. “Head in?”
“Wait a minute.”
“You said you were cold.”
“I mean this, Corran. I’d like to settle up here.”
“Yep, brilliant. Done deal. Let’s go in.”
“I don’t think you’re taking me seriously. And I can tell you’re angry with me. I wish you could let it go.”
Corran gave a short laugh. “Look,” he said. “I hate to break this to you. But I’ve had some other shit going on this year. I haven’t had a whole lot of time to be mad at you.” He walked toward the house and stopped midway, then turned back to Johnny. “Sorry you came all this way. You needn’t have.” Corran disappeared into the cottage. Johnny looked at the rivulets of water, already starting to crystallize on the concrete. He rose and slowly followed his son back inside.
By midday, Sharon said they had to get out of the cottage. “Blooming barmy, we’re driving each other,” she said. So after lunch they’d all piled into the Polo. They managed, incredibly, to maneuver Lucy’s bulky car seat into the middle of the backseat and to still have just enough room for Corran and Sharon to squeeze in on either side. Johnny didn’t understand why Lucy had a car seat if Corran didn’t even have a car, but when he asked the question Corran was brusque: “Sometimes my sitter takes her places. And then we need a seat.” Well, all righty then. Johnny took shotgun, with Chemal at the wheel. “I guess I’ll stop asking stupid questions,” he muttered. No one answered.
The Ice House Page 27
